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impenetrable” forest without a path as “scarcely less bitter than death.”
    Five hundred years later, a Romantic like Lord Byron could proclaim that there is “a pleasure in the pathless woods,” but only once the wilds of Western Europe had been tamed and caged. By that point, the true “pathless wilderness” was believed to exist only on other continents, like North America, where the phrase was still being used well into the nineteenth century. I The American wilderness came to symbolize an inhospitable and far-off land, cold, cruel, and uncivilized. At the Boston Railroad Jubilee in 1851, the politician Edward Everett described the land between Boston and Canada as a “horrible wilderness, rivers and lakes unspanned by human art, pathless swamps, dismal forests that it made the flesh creep to enter . . .”
    Pathless wildernesses still exist in the modern world, and at least some have retained their power to elicit dread. I have visited one such place. It lay on the northern rim of a glacial fjord called Western Brook Pond, on the island of Newfoundland, in Canada’s easternmost province. If you want to be taught (however harshly) the blessing of a well-marked trail, go there.
    To cross the fjord’s stygian waters, I had to hire a ferryboat. Aboard the ferry, the captain explained that the water below the boat was so pure (in a hydrologist’s terms, so ultraoligotrophic) that it bordered on nonexistence; he said it played havoc with the sensors in modern water pumps because the water couldn’t even carry an electrical current.
    On the far side of the fjord, the captain dropped me and four other hikers off at the base of a long ravine, where a series of animal trails led through a dense fern jungle and up a granite cliff face bisected by a waterfall. This was my first hiking trip since returning home from the Appalachian Trail. I felt strong; my pack was light. Weaving through the tall ferns, I quickly passed the other hikers. At the top of the ravine I found a vast green tableland. The trail I had been following vanished altogether. Soaked in sweat from the hike up, I took a moment to rest, my feet dangling over the cliff’s edge. At the ragged western edge of the tableland, it abruptly dropped hundreds of feet to the fjord’s indigo water.
    I sat and watched as the other hikers wound their way up the ravine. Once they had reached the top, the other four hikers all headed south, along a more scenic route. Watching them go, laboring beneath their heavy packs, I felt a swell of confidence. I rose, mapand compass in hand, and headed north. This shouldn’t be too tough , I thought. After all, it’s only sixteen miles.
    As I began hiking, however, that confidence soon withered. One might suppose that, after a lifetime of walking within the rigid confines of trails and pathways—from wilderness footpaths to the moving walkways in airports—it would come as a relief to roam free in any direction. But this was not the case. A low bass beat of terror throbbed behind my every decision. I was alone, and without any means of communication save a small, park-issued radio locator beacon, which resembled a large plastic pill with a wire hanging out of it. It could be used, I had been assured, to track me down if the park ranger’s office hadn’t heard from me for more than twenty-four hours after my scheduled return. It seemed a wonderful device for recovering corpses.
    More bedeviling though, was the sheer number of minuscule choices I was forced to make at each turn. Even with a rough idea of where I was meant to go, there were still countless decisions to make at any one moment: whether to slant uphill or down; whether this tuft of grass or that would support my weight as I tiptoed across a bog; whether to hop along the rocks on a lakeshore’s edge or bash my way through the bush. In every landscape, as in every mathematical proof, there